


stubborn marrow in bastard bones

by addandsubtract



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, M/M, Minor Violence, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2020-06-25 14:44:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19747852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addandsubtract/pseuds/addandsubtract
Summary: Kyungsoo is already in medical when the pilots are dragged in on stretchers.





	stubborn marrow in bastard bones

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally written for the chingux exchange on livejournal in 2014. warnings for general grossness and bad decision-making skills, i guess.

Kyungsoo is already in medical when the pilots are dragged in on stretchers. There’d been an accident in the mechanics bay – the kind where Kyungsoo is lucky not to have been electrocuted – and Kyungsoo is sitting patiently on one of the beds, trying not to bleed too much while the doctor – not Lu Han, Lu Han is on nights – gets the sutures ready.

Of course when the pilots come in hot he’s immediately forgotten. They’d been out maybe two hours, some Kaiju no one’s managed to name yet, category two. Small enough for the Hong Kong Shatterdome to handle on its on, supposedly. Kyungsoo holds a wad of balled-up fabric to the side of his head and tries not to notice how Baekhyun isn’t breathing before the curtain goes up around him. Chanyeol is pushing himself up on one arm, the other curled tightly around his ribs like he’s holding them in, trying to see past the swarm of medical staff, and then he’s gone, too, behind a second curtain. Kyungsoo hears yelling, the zing of electricity singing, smells the ozone in the air. There’s a thud – Baekhyun’s back hitting the bed? – and the doctors are still talking, urgently, but there’s no second wave. No one says, “Clear!” again.

A drop of blood drips from the point of Kyungsoo’s chin and soaks into the thigh of his coveralls. After a moment he takes a deep breath and pushes himself to his feet. He’s lightheaded, spots of color sparking at the edges of his vision, but he can’t be here for this. He steadies himself against the edge of the bed, and then slips out. No one notices, but then again, they’re distracted. He’s not a pilot.

Kyungsoo got far enough in the pilot program to do his first real drift. The half hour he spent stuck in the memory of his family’s evacuation inland felt like two weeks – the hoards of bodies crushed together, the stench of sweat-slicked flesh, his mother clutching at his hand hard enough to bruise. Meal after meal of rice laced with maggots, the sickening crunch of them. Drinking nothing but boiled water. His bleeding feet.

He has good reflexes, good instincts, he’s a fast thinker. He has no desire to chase the RABIT again. Sometimes he still thinks about the look on Chanyeol’s face when he told Chanyeol he’d decided to transfer.

“Do you even know anything about mechanics?” Chanyeol had asked, clearly baffled. “I thought – we were supposed to –” Chanyeol cut himself off, reconsidered whatever he was going to say, and shrugged instead. “Be happy, okay?”

“I’m moving two floors up, not across the country, idiot,” Kyungsoo had said. “I’ll still be here.”

Things are more complicated than that, though.

Kyungsoo wakes up twelve hours later, according to the clock - five hours after his shift was supposed to end, and four hours before his next shift is due to start. His head is throbbing. Jongdae is in his bunk, half a bottle of the shitty moonshine the techs get off the mainland leaning against his thigh. He’s not flushed, so he’s probably not drunk, but he’s reading Kyungsoo’s beaten-up copy of _Frankenstein_ , so he’s probably not really okay either.

“Baekhyun?” Kyungsoo asks, his voice a hoarse croak. Jongdae starts, and then lets the book close.

“Alive, apparently,” Jongdae says. “Comatose. On a scale from mild to severe brain damage, how concussed are you?”

Kyungsoo stops to consider that for a moment. “More than mild, less than moderate,” he says. “Closer to mild, though, probably. Not entirely sure.”

“You were supposed to get stitches.” Jongdae raises his eyebrows in the way that means he’s asking a question without asking. His socked feet kick against the edge of the bed. There’s a hole in the left, just above his heel.

“I was going to, but the pilots,” Kyungsoo says, and shrugs. It makes his vision weave a little, but if he pretends hard enough he figures he’ll be all right. “You know how it is.”

Jongdae makes a face. “They’re all taken care of, you could go now.”

“I could,” Kyungsoo says. He probably won’t, though. “Have you had dinner? I think I could keep something down.”

Jongdae’s expression does that thing where he’s trying to have too many feelings at once – exasperation and fondness, worry, irritation, consideration – and he’s so expressive that everything sort of jumbles together on his face at one time. 

“It’s Friday, they’ll have dumplings,” Kyungsoo says, and tries not to sound wheedling.

“Fine,” Jongdae says, like he was ever going to say no. “But if you barf or fall over I’m dragging you in to medical.”

“Okay,” Kyungsoo says easily, and he means it, but it won’t come to that. He’s good at masking his symptoms when he’s not actively bleeding from the scalp. “I promise.”

Kyungsoo spends most of the next eighteen hours inside Black Pearl’s left arm and shoulder, trying to get the pulse canon back online. He takes catnaps when he can, eats mostly from the teacart the mess crew sends down for the overnight shift. Yixing and Minseok have their calculation for the next Kaiju breach already - the span is just over three weeks, but the damage Black Pearl took in the fight was extensive, and the pulse canon is particularly volatile. Better to get it patched up quickly than have it take out half the mechanics bay when it shorts or explodes.

The only reason Kyungsoo gets away with it, basically, is that he and Jongdae are on opposite shifts this month. They overlap a few hours at a time at most.

There were a few months where the higher-ups told Kyungsoo he had the makings of an exemplary pilot, and he almost believed them. He’d passed all the tests easily, spent the requisite time in training. The drift was something else – turns out that he wants to relive his own memories even less than he wants to share his brain with another person. Once was enough. There had been noises made when he transferred, but it happened that he was a better engineer than a pilot anyway. He gets away with plenty because of it, and he’s not above using that to his advantage. For now that advantage is to dream as little as possible and think even less. The concussion is probably helping with that latter bit.

Jongdae finds him napping inside Black Pearl’s piloting capsule after the shift change and twists his ear until he agrees to sleep in his actual rack.

“Blah blah blah, sleep deprivation, concussion, blah,” Kyungsoo says, rubbing at his earlobe. It feels hot where Jongdae dug his fingernails in. “I get it.”

“Yeah, well, I told Joonmyun you haven’t been taking mandated breaks _and_ that you’re not getting proper medical treatment, so, you know. Sucks to be you,” Jongdae says, and sticks out his tongue. “I have no problem with ratting you out.”

“I know where you hide your weird black market porn,” Kyungsoo says, but there isn’t enough of a threat in it. He’s too tired, and his head hurts too much.

“And I know where you hide yours.” Jongdae rolls his eyes. As a response it doesn’t make sense, because Kyungsoo usually just steals from Jongdae’s stash, but that’s not really an argument Kyungsoo feels like having. “Look, go take a nap, and then you can keep Chanyeol company for awhile. He’s still stuck in medical and it’ll get Joonmyun off your back.”

“You’re the one who put Joonmyun on my back to begin with,” Kyungsoo points out.

“Only because I care about you and don’t want your brain to leak out of your ears,” Jongdae says, grinning in that way that makes Kyungsoo grudgingly forgive him. Then he reaches forward and squishes both of Kyungsoo’s cheeks between his palms, and Kyungsoo un-forgives him just as quickly. “Look, just go gripe at Chanyeol. You know how he gets when he’s bored.”

Does Kyungsoo ever.

It’s theoretically just after dawn when Kyungsoo rolls out of bed. He needs a shower, and to pee, and then maybe to get extremely drunk before going to deal with Chanyeol. Chanyeol takes more patience than Kyungsoo has on a regular day. He can’t decide if the splitting headache is going to help or not. He suspects not.

Plus with Baekhyun down for the count there’s no one for Chanyeol to mind meld with.

When Kyungsoo does wander into medical, Chanyeol is huddled underneath the blankets with his knees pulled up, an ancient magazine balanced against the tops of his thighs. It’s some music thing – the picture on the front is of the last wave of idol groups before the Kaiju panic really set in and no one wanted that kind of escapism anymore. Exactly the sort of thing Chanyeol loves.

“Jongin brought you some reading material, huh?” Kyungsoo says, and watches with some amusement and a little alarm as Chanyeol jolts, the magazine flopping down against his stomach, and then winces.

“Fuck,” Chanyeol says. “Walk a little louder, huh?”

“Grumpy,” Kyungsoo observes. He’s been doing his best not to think about Baekhyun, but it’s harder when he’s sitting two beds down from the machine beeping in time with his heart.

Chanyeol must see him looking, because he says, “They’re keeping him in a medically induced coma for another 24 hours or so. After that –” Chanyeol shrugs.

“He’ll be fine,” Kyungsoo says. “He always is.”

Chanyeol pauses almost imperceptibly before saying, “Yeah.” 

Kyungsoo wants to ask, but he wants _more_ not to. Chanyeol had to feel Baekhyun collapse. It’s a miracle he got Black Pearl back to the Shatterdome. Kyungsoo looks down the line of beds to Baekhyun again, how weirdly still he is.

“How’re your ribs?” he asks, tugging the chair next to Chanyeol’s bed a little closer to the mattress.

“Two hairline fractures and a shitload of bruising,” Chanyeol says. “Lu Han says I’ll be out of here and back to my quarters tomorrow. Probably before they wake Baekhyun up.” The twist to Chanyeol’s mouth shows just how much he appreciates that.

“Well, I’m on light duties until medical will tell Joonmyun that I’m not concussed, so,” he trails off with a shrug.

Chanyeol looks him over in that weirdly serious way that Chanyeol has, sometimes, taking in the scab nearly hidden by Kyunsoo’s hair, the way his fingers are trembling the slightest bit. Then he pushes it away.

“I’m bored, though,” he says, a whine threaded through the words. “Come up here and read to me, huh?”

Kyungsoo doesn’t want to – doesn’t want to admit he wants to – but Chanyeol pouts, and sometimes it’s just easier to give in. He climbs up onto the bed and fits himself against Chanyeol’s side. Chanyeol is tall, but he’s not broad. He doesn’t take up any more width than Kyungsoo does, really. They manage to fit.

Kyungsoo reads Chanyeol a gossip column about an idol suspected of illicitly dating an actress – showing him the pictures where necessary – and then an article about the gradual disbanding of one of Seoul’s biggest boy groups as the Kaiju threat mounted. It’s full of quotes with the members, all of them talking about spending more time with their families, enlisting in the cause. Saying all the right words. When he looks over, it’s been an hour, and Chanyeol is asleep, his head propped on Kyungsoo’s shoulder. Kyungsoo glances one more time over to Baekhyun, and lets Chanyeol sleep.

When Kyungsoo gets back to his rack, Jongdae is sleeping in it – he was probably waiting up for Kyungsoo, and then couldn’t manage it. Kyungsoo thinks about stealing Jongdae’s for the night, but somehow he doesn’t want to sleep alone. Chanyeol napped on him for a few hours, and then they’d played poker, Kyungsoo ignoring the way Chanyeol would go silent in the middle of sentences, as if expecting someone else – Baekhyun – to finish them for him, Chanyeol pretending with all his might that neither of them were thinking about what might happen tomorrow. It was exhausting.

Kyungsoo closes the door behind him and shucks his coveralls. He crawls into bed behind Jongdae, wearing his boxers and undershirt, already a little cold from the chill of the room. Jongdae murmurs something quiet and wriggles forward, giving Kyungsoo more room. Kyungsoo hooks one foot over Jongdae’s ankle and tucks an arm around his waist. Jongdae is shirtless, wearing briefs and socks and nothing else. His skin is warm against Kyungsoo’s.

They’ve done this before – not often, but enough. Kyungsoo tucks his nose into the hair at the nape of Jongdae’s neck and falls asleep easily.

Baekhyun doesn’t wake up. The doctors on shift in medical tell Kyungsoo that it could take a few days, but Kyungsoo watches the way they take Baekhyun’s pulse, the way they glance at each other. Lu Han is still on nights, or Kyungsoo would ask him. Kyungsoo’s not sure he’d like what Lu Han would have to say, but it’s better than being lied to.

Kyungsoo is deemed day to day, concussion-wise. He’s sent back to his quarters, but he doubts anyone expects him to stay there. Jongdae isn’t there, anyway, and Kyungsoo doesn’t want to be alone.

With Baekhyun and Chanyeol both out indefinitely, Tao and Sehun are the only pilots left in the Shatterdome, and they’re both inexperienced in real combat. Just out of Anchorage as of three months ago. When Kyungsoo gets to the mess, they’re seated at a table in the back corner, heads bent together over a tablet. Jongin is sitting across from them with his chin propped on one hand, the other curled around a fork, idly stabbing at the bean sprouts left on his plate from lunch.

“Feeling left out?” Kyungsoo asks, once he’s put some sautéed tofu on a plate with rice and a lot of thick, syrupy ginger sauce.

Jongin raises his eyebrows, then glances back at Sehun and Tao. Sehun makes a rude-looking hand gesture, mouth twisted in a half-smile, and Tao laughs until he snorts. Neither of them look up.

“No more than usual,” Jongin says. He picks up his plate, and scrapes his sprouts onto Kyungsoo’s. “Now eat your vegetables.”

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, but he’s not picky about food the way Jongin is. Once you’ve eaten maggots, it’s hard to have strong vegetable preferences. “How’re things at command?” he asks around a mouthful of food.

Jongin gives him a disgusted look. Kyungsoo isn’t sure if it’s his manners or the question. He shrugs apologetically.

“Peachy,” Jongin says. “Fewer than twenty days until the next event and we’re down a pilot and a half. Joonmyun is tearing his hair out, but what’s new?”

“Baekhyun’s going to wake up,” Kyungsoo says, because he can’t not. 

Jongin freezes for half a second and then nods. “Of course, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be ready to pilot Black Pearl again right out of the gate. I’m sure he’ll have – PT, or something. Lu Han would know.”

Kyungsoo knows Jongin is just agreeing to be nice, but he appreciates it anyway.

The days pass sluggishly. Kyungsoo visits medical when he can bear to, which isn’t as often as he thinks he should. He takes to reading aloud to Baekhyun from the book of erotic short stories Jongdae bought him as a joke for his last birthday – Kaiju-lover stuff, full of tentacles and gushing blue fluid. Like he can annoy Baekhyun into waking up. Sometimes Chanyeol’s there, and they take turns reading the dialogue. Twice, he’s come by in the middle of the night to find Jongdae curled up, sleeping, on Baekhyun’s bed.

Baekhyun looks so small – reduced, almost, like someone took a large syringe and pulled out everything that made him so irritating, and hilarious, and alive. It’s disquieting to the point that Kyungsoo finds it hard to touch him, even the back of his hand where the IV is threaded into his vein. His skin looks thin, papery. Everything about it wrong.

“What do you talk to him about, when I’m not here?” Kyungsoo asks Chanyeol, once, during the second week. They’re not talking about the event clock, ticking down the days. There are a lot of things he and Chanyeol don’t talk about, actually.

“Whatever comes to mind,” Chanyeol says, but his voice is tight. He breathes for a long moment before speaking again. “Sometimes I’m just so – angry with him. He’s so stupid.”

Kyungsoo hasn’t asked what happened, the precise order of events, because it doesn’t matter. Chanyeol talks around it, like Baekhyun made some kind of heroic, idiotic sacrifice, like Chanyeol can’t decide if he should be angry or grateful so he’s both. “Yeah,” Kyungsoo says.

Kyungsoo comes back from the mechanics bay sweaty and covered in black grime, streaks of oil up to his forearms, in his hair. He tries not to pull twelve-hour shifts, but the closer the event clock gets to the big number, the more work there seems to be. He strips down, as quiet as possible, and grabs his towel. Jongdae is asleep in Kyungsoo’s bed again – Kyungsoo feels like they haven’t talked, they haven’t been talking enough, but they’ve been sleeping together just about every night lately. There’s nothing wrong with it. Jongdae has known Baekhyun longer than almost anyone – they evacuated together, enlisted together – and so if Jongdae doesn’t want to talk, Kyungsoo won’t make him.

He has the shower room to himself, and rinses off quickly, scrubbing hard to get the dark smudges off of his skin. His feet ache, and the muscles in his calves feel so tight that he’s worried about standing for long. Something is going to have to change soon. They can’t all keep going on like this.

When he gets back to the bunker, Jongdae is awake, sitting up in Kyungsoo’s rack. Kyungsoo stands in the doorway for a moment, dripping onto the floor. He shakes himself, steps inside, turns the door closed and locked. Jongdae is rubbing a hand over his face.

“Sorry,” Kyungsoo says, and turns away to pull on his clothes. He hears Jongdae snort.

“I can still see your butt,” Jongdae says. “Very shapely.” He punctuates this with a yawn. Kyungsoo can hear his jaw creak, the rustle of the sheets. He rubs his towel over his hair and pretends that he’s not flushing.

“I do a lot of squats,” he says, deadpan, and Jongdae actually laughs. It’s a good sound. All of them are stretched thin, pressed flat like the wildflowers Kyungsoo’s mother left to dry between the pages of her dog-eared copy of Emily Dickinson.

“What’re you thinking about?” Jongdae asks. Kyungsoo pauses, bare feet on the cold floor, and climbs onto the bunk, burrows underneath the covers. After a moment, Jongdae stretches out next to him, tangles his fingers into the fabric of Kyungsoo’s t-shirt just over Kyungsoo’s ribcage.

“My mother,” Kyungsoo says, “kind of.”

“What about her?”

“She had so many books, before the evacuation – poetry, mostly, from all over, and she had a verse for every situation. She always knew what the right words were. I don’t.”

“Sometimes there aren’t any,” Jongdae says, matter of fact, the look on his face half tolerant and a little sad, more than a little amused. His mouth quirks, and he leans in, digs his chin into the arch of Kyungsoo’s shoulder. Kyungsoo doesn’t have a response, not a real one, so he doesn’t say anything else.

Kyungsoo didn’t really get to know Jongdae until after he left the piloting program. Baekhyun would talk about him, mention little weird tidbits, like how he’d accidentally broken two of Baekhyun’s fingers when they were twelve, and the time they’d mixed bleach in with Jondae’s older brother’s shampoo the summer before their last year of high school and gotten Jongdae extra chores for two months. 

“He’d looked good, though,” Baekhyun had said, waggling his eyebrows, and Chanyeol had cracked up.

Baekhyun hadn’t talked to Kyungsoo for a good six months after he left, just out of spite, and getting to know Jongdae was a little weird, reversed. He already knew all of these intimate things about Jongae’s family, but not if they’d get along, or what Jongdae did with his free time.

It worked out okay, though.

Kyungsoo has been thinking about it for two days before he does anything. He doesn’t tell Jongdae, because Jongdae would call him a selfish asshole, and probably lock him in their bunker for the rest of his life, but – well, Kyungsoo has to do _something_. Someone has to do something.

There’s three days until the next event, but it’s not that, really, that makes him do it. It’s how thin Baekhyun’s wrists are.

No one stops him when he walks into the mechanics bay, because this close to an event he rarely leaves and everyone knows it. It’s surprisingly easy to pick a pons out of stack of used parts and get to work.

He waits until he knows Chanyeol will be back in his bunker, when he knows Jongdae is on shift, when the medical staff is running on a skeleton crew and no one will stop to make him answer questions about the bag he’s lugging over one shoulder and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. He patches the pons into medical’s generator, and spares a moment to feel bad about it, but then he’s sliding one onto Baekhyun’s forehead, and other onto his own, and then he’s in the drift for the second time, looking for Baekhyun.

He realizes that he doesn’t know how long he’s been picking maggots out of his rice, just that there’s a sizeable pile of them wriggling at the bottom of his bowl, and then he realizes that he doesn’t know where he is.

The wooden bench is solid underneath his thighs, sun-baked, but his mother should be here, somewhere, and the scar on the back of his hand is a burn that he didn’t get until –

Until mechanics with Jongdae, the second month in, when he’d soldered right onto his own flesh. It had smell awful. Bubbled up like microwaved plastic.

And he thinks, _oh, I’m not here at all, I’m –_ and then he’s sprawled, drunk, on the metal floor by Black Pearl’s feet, and Chanyeol has a hand in his hair, idle, and Jongdae is laughing, bottle in his left hand, the grip loose and languid, telling a story about Baekhyun from when they were kids. Baekhyun should be protesting, voice snide, cutting, saying something about how Jongdae’s got it all wrong, but he isn’t, because he isn’t there anymore – not at all –

Something is beeping. Steady beeping, under the sound of Jongdae’s laughter getting further away, the snorting honk as Chanyeol accidentally breathes in alcohol, and Kyungsoo thinks, _the hospital, oh, the hospital_.

And Chanyeol is bleeding on him. He’s smiling in that Chanyeol way, infuriating, about to say something about how funny this whole situation is, but his hand is clenched tight in his suit, and so is Black Pearl’s, and Chanyeol is dripping blood onto the console, onto the back of Kyungsoo’s hand. This isn’t Kyungsoo’s memory. This isn’t his to see. He pushes, thinks or maybe says, “Baekhyun, come on,” urgently between his teeth. His mouth tastes like copper, his own blood, or still Chanyeol’s maybe.

Kyungsoo was the one with the head wound. Baekhyun is the one who turned Black Pearl at the last minute, took the brunt of the attack along the left side, his side. Kyungsoo doesn’t know how he knows this.

“Baekhyun,” he says again, or maybe thinks. Desperate. “Come home.”

There’s a flash, Jongdae and Kyungsoo curled up in their rack, the beeping of machinery, dripping IV fluid and Chanyeol hunched in the bedside chair, rereading the last short story Kyungsoo read when he visited. Kyungsoo swears that he feels something – something moving, something pushing against him, and then everything goes black.

His mouth still tastes like copper when he surfaces into consciousness, but that’s because his nose is bleeding.

“Idiot,” Chanyeol says, bending down like a furious stork, face flushed. “You are a goddamned idiot.”

The pons is lying next to Kyungsoo, and the bleached linoleum is cool against Kyungsoo’s back. He’s on the floor next to Baekhyun’s bed, which must be why Chanyeol looks so far away. Kyungsoo feels like his head isn’t really attached to anything.

“Hi,” he says, and wipes his face with the back of his hand. Chanyeol’s scowl deepens, and he opens his mouth like he’s going to start yelling, but Jongdae kneels at Kyungsoo’s side instead, appearing from somewhere outside of Kyungsoo’s periphery.

“You were seizing when we found you, you asshole,” Jongdae says, quiet, the exact tone that Kyungsoo knows will make him feel guilty later, even if now he can’t quite manage it.

“Sorry,” he says, though he’s not, really, for what he did. Just for scaring them. All of his muscles hurt.

Chanyeol opens his mouth again, but there’s a noise behind Kyungsoo, a kind of low whine, and Chanyeol’s eyes snap up. 

“Jesus,” Jongdae says, looking where Chanyeol is, and Kyungsoo figures that it must be Baekhyun. “Chanyeol, can you –” Jongdae says, and Chanyeol goes without further prompting. Jongdae pushes Kyungsoo’s bangs off of his forehead, cups the back of his neck. Kyungsoo makes a noise, cat-like satisfaction with how warm Jongdae’s hands are, but something about it makes Jongdae’s eyes widen. Then he smiles.

“Baekhyun?” Kyungsoo prompts. 

Jongdae nods. “You’re still an asshole,” he says, and kisses Kyungsoo once on the mouth, and then on the forehead. When he pulls back, he laughs. “Whoops, got some blood on you.”

His fingers are gentle, rubbing the skin above Kyungsoo’s eyebrows. His mouth is red with Kyungsoo’s blood. Kyungsoo wants to put his head on Jongdae’s shoulder and go to sleep. He can hear Chanyeol murmuring something urgent behind him, and then an odd croaking that must be Baekhyun laughing.

“Couldn’t go on without me, huh?” Baekhyun says, hoarse.

“You’re welcome,” Kyungsoo says, and presses his cheek against the point of Jongdae’s shoulder, trying not to get any blood on him. Any more blood.

“I’m going to get a doctor,” Chanyeol decides, and Kyungsoo would nod – solid decision – but instead he closes his eyes.

Joonmyun is livid, of course, and Kyungsoo has to stay in medical for observation until he calms down, but at least Baekhyun is awake to keep him company. They have two days until the next event. Baekhyun and Chanyeol won’t be piloting, but at least they’re both alive. It’s something. It matters.

Jongdae steals him two dumplings from the mess and sits with his feet up on Kyungsoo’s bed. “It’s Friday,” he says, like Kyungsoo doesn’t know. “They always have dumplings on Fridays. What chapter were you on?”

He has Kyungsoo’s book of Kaiju erotica in his lap, and a wide grin on his face. Kyungsoo rolls his eyes.

“Eleven,” he says. “You should get Chanyeol to do the voices, he’s really good at it.”

Jongdae nudges him in the thigh with his toes, and says, “Later, when he gets here. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with me.”

Kyungsoo is okay with that.


End file.
